he hour seven, the reply yes or no by
messenger.

'But we are man to man, so there's no "No" between us two,' the note
said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been
philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important
fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when
for men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.

Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him
magnanimous.

'It may be the solution,' his father remarked.

Both had the desire; and Gower's reply was the yes, our brave male word,
supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it as a
form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.

CHAPTER XXIII

IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN

Right soon the London pot began to bubble. There was a marriage.

'There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not
consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,' the Old
Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a
series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.

This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black
as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous
eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon's
descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world. Asserted
here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of
vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible. Contradiction
retired into corners, only to be swept out of them. For this marriage,
abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled
the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world's
cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.

For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last
night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been
enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches
riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them! She
caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him with
the customary facility of a pecking pullet.

But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so
gobbled?

There is the mystery of it. On his coming of age, that young man gave
sign of his having a city head. He put his guardians deliberate